Art & Advertising

Walking along Hosier Lane with the street artist, CDH who was half-heartedly tearing off the advertising posters. CDH was talking about making Hosier Lane an advertising free space (a worth while ambition). CDH wants to distinguish between art and advertising but I’m not sure that such a distinction can be made because the nexus between art and advertising means that there is no necessary feature to create a clear distinction. CDH and I have been discussing an article from The Atlantic Cities about Los Angels attempt to restrict mural adverting (“The Convoluted Path to Ending Los Angeles’s Mural Ban” by Nate Berg, March 22, 2012).

Advertising for the play “Optimism”, 2009

I have written about the relationship between street art and advertising in an earlier post. Aside from the propaganda element of advertising that has always been important in art and thinking only about avant-garde visual art and mass-market advertising it is clear that there is an increasing relationship in the 20^th Century.

The use of advertising material in the visual arts started with collages by the Dadaists and Kurt Schwitters. Was the word “Dada” taken from an advertisement for Dada brand shampoo rather than from the mythic random dictionary search? Almost anticipating Pop Art, Charles Sheeler’s “I Saw The Figure 5 in Gold” from 1928 used the bright colours and images of American cigarette packaging. American cigarette advertising was the start of modern advertising. In 1949 Raymond Hains and Jacques de la Mahé Villeglé used layers of torn advertising posters in a process they called “décollage”. In the 1960s many Pop artists used advertising material, Roy Lichtenstein used images from magazine advertising as the subject for his art although Andy Warhol concentrated on packaging design rather than advertising. In the 1980s many artists influenced by Pop Art used advertising material, most notably Jeff Koons and Barbara Kruger. Koons reproduced magazine advertising and made magazine advertising for himself that were printed in art magazines. Koons marketed himself as a brand. Kruger uses the same visual techniques as advertising in her art.

Advertising has had a close relationship with the visual arts; not surprising since both the artists working in the advertising art department and artists not working in adverting have the same art education. In 1888 Pears Soap first used John Everett Millais painting “Bubbles” 1886 as advertising; Pears was another early innovator in mass market adverting. Also created in the 1880s Toulouse Lautrec’s posters advertising cabaret acts have now entered the art cannon (currently on exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia). Since then advertising has used notable artists to create images for advertising, like Absolut Vodka (see their art collection) or to endorse products, Dali and Lavin chocolate in 1968 (see the video).

Given the increasingly close relationship between avant-garde arts and advertising it is likely that advanced art in the future will have more references to advertising. For more on this subject read Joan Gibbons Art and Advertising (I.B. Tauris, 2005).

Koons to Banksy

The Jeff Koons Handbook

Banksy, Little Diver, Melbourne

Trying to take a bash at a brief history of art post 1984 when Danto wrote his essay “The End of Art”. Read Arthur C. Danto The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University Press, 1986) to the present. The pendulum of fashion swings between decades; it is kept moving by a variety of forces from the sheer perversity of artists’ efforts to the gravity of the needs that the extremes of the fashion have ignored. It is not surprising that street art, whimsical illustrations and small collectable artwork have become the current fashion after the large institutional art of the late 1980s.

Comparing two popular artists Jeff Koons and Banksy demonstrate some of the differences between these two eras. Both Koons and Banksy are popular artists who employed a prankster personality to promote a sentimental image based art. Behind their pranks and their images both are commenting about society, its values and its morals. Yet the differences between their two decades are enormous from the New York art world of the 1980s to a British internet and street-art phenomena.

Jeff Koons – “ I want communicate to as wide a mass a possible. And the way to communicate with the public right now is through TV and advertising. The art world is not effective right now.”

Banksy  – “The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

Jeff Koons promoted himself and his identity as part of his art. The image of Jeff Koons smiling face and slicked back hair was in the media and in many of his art works. Banksy is unidentified and shadowy. Both are clearly media savvy but use the media in a very different way and have a very different media image. Koons was as accessible and exposed as his porn star wife, Ilona. Bansky replaced Koon’s brash, proud, and media friendly image with an anonymous hoodie and mystery.

Part of the difference is that the popular media has changed from mass media to the internet. Koons specialized in magazines, posters and TV documentaries. On the internet Banksy dominated exploiting the anonymity and publicity that it provided. Eventually the establishment could not ignore the extent of Banksy’s fan base and the sales figures for his art.

The art of both Banksy and Koons exists in a wide price range, from relatively inexpensive works to beyond what any of us can afford. Jeff Koons marketed to art galleries and art collectors whereas Banksy’s market was neither of these and his prices were initially significantly lower. Koons worked within the contemporary art world and created spectacular art for the major art galleries, like “Puppy”, at the Bilbao Guggenheim. Banksy gave his art to the public on the street and it was the ordinary public that started to buy his art. Now some city councils are trying to preserve what they initially thought that they didn’t want.

Due to the differences between their markets there is a difference in the content Koons and Banksy’s art. Koons’s art generated some controversy with his plagiarism/appropriation of popular images and his sexual images. Banksy is far more subversive and his art has been described as vandalism and his images attacked the image of the police, the Israeli West Bank wall and art galleries. He is the anarchist rat, the criminal artist. The irony and confidence of the late 20^th century has been replaced by an increasing feeling of doom and rebellion in the first decade of the 21st century.